Schoolgirl dies after cervical cancer vaccination

With so many young girls being harmed by these inoculations, would it not be more prudent to put a halt to this nationwide immunisation programme and look into other measures of preventing girls from attracting the Human Papilloma virus?

Natalie Morton, aged 14, from Coventry. Photograph: Caters News Agency Ltd

Jo Adetunji, The Guardian, Tuesday 29 September 2009:

An urgent investigation has been launched after a 14-year-old girl died shortly after receiving a cervical cancer vaccination at her school. was a pupil at the Blue Coat Church of England School in Coventry, where she was given the human papilloma virus (HPV) jab yesterday. She was taken to Coventry University hospital, where she died at lunchtime.

Natalie Morton

A letter to parents posted on the school’s website by the headteacher, Dr Julie Roberts, said a girl had suffered a “rare but extreme reaction” after being given the vaccine. The precise cause of her death remains unknown.

Three other girls from the school are reported to have experienced possible side effects of dizziness and nausea after receiving the Cervarix jab, which was given to female pupils as part of a national immunisation programme against HPV. Their symptoms were described as mild and none was taken to hospital.

Although no link has yet been made between Natalie’s death and the HPV vaccine, NHS Coventry said it had quarantined the batch as a “precautionary measure” and had contacted the parents of other children at the school who may have been affected.

Dr Caron Grainger, joint director for public health for NHS Coventry and Coventry city council, said: “Our sympathies are with the girl’s family and friends at this difficult time. The incident happened shortly after the girl had received her HPV vaccine in the school. No link can be made between the death and the vaccine until all the facts are known and a postmortem takes place.” She added: “We are conducting an urgent and full investigation into the events surrounding this tragedy.”

Dr Pim Kon, medical director at GlaxoSmithKline UK, which manufactures Cervarix, offered the company’s “deepest sympathies” to the girl’s family and friends.

“We are working with the Department of Health (DoH) and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to better understand this case, as at this stage the exact cause of this tragic death is unknown,” she said.

Although national programmes also exist in other European countries, Britain is the only country to have opted to use Cervarix, rather than a rival brand called Gardasil.

Although the NHS said the drug underwent “rigorous safety testing” before being chosen for the programme, the shadow health secretary, Andrew Lansley, called for more transparency over the assessments made of Cervarix and Gardasil. “This is tragic news and will be deeply concerning for all the families involved,” he said. “The DoH and the MHRA need to investigate, as a matter of urgency, what the cause of this is so they can assess how widespread the problem could be.”

The public health minister, Gillian Merron, said: “It is important we have the results of further investigations as soon as possible to establish the cause of this sad event.”

Cervical cancer is responsible for more than 1,000 deaths in Britain each year, with around 3,000 women diagnosed annually. The vaccine offers protection against HPV, a sexually transmitted disease most commonly linked with the cancer, and is thought to have safely been given to 1.4 million girls across the country, at a cost of around £242 per person.

The national programme to immunise all schoolgirls aged 12 and over began across the UK last autumn, with the aim of offering the vaccine to all girls under the age of 18 by 2011. The decision to immunise teenagers before they become sexually active has been controversial, with some critics of the programme claiming the treatment would encourage more teenagers to engage in sexual activity.

Video:BBC radio news report’vaccine death’

Daryl Hannah and green living

Check out Daryl Hannah’s super cool video blog where she pleads for renewable energy sources like biodiesel (walnut oil, recycled French fries oil etc).

Here’s one cool chick who isn’t afraid to call herself a nerd….

Let’s hear it for the nerds of this world, who wants to be part of the establishment anyway?

14 years after Ken Saro-Wiwa’s death, family points finger at Shell in court

The Guardian, Wednesday 27 May 2009

In 1995, at a trial that resulted in his conviction and execution, the Nigerian writer and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa vowed that the oil giant Shell would one day be brought to justice.

That day is looming large as a New York court prepares for a trial in which the oil giant Shell stands accused of crimes against humanity over its activities in the oil-rich Niger Delta of southern Nigeria.

Today, a last minute delay to the trial postponed the jury selection until next week. But when it does start, the trial will excite huge interest on the part of multinational companies and human rights bodies, because the outcome could have a bearing on the issue of corporate accountability and how far it extends.

Saro-Wiwa made his prediction days before he and eight other leaders of the Ogoni people were hanged by the Nigerian military regime in November 1995.

In a final statement at his own trial, which he was prevented from delivering, Saro-Wiwa said of Shell that “its day will surely come. The crime of the company’s dirty wars against the Ogoni people will be punished.”

When the trial does begin, relatives of the Ogoni nine, as the executed leaders are known, will be present in court as plaintiffs in the civil lawsuit against the firm. They and the other plaintiffs allege that Shell was an active participant in atrocities and abuses carried out by Nigeria’s military police.

In addition to the alleged murder of the Ogoni nine, they also hold Shell partially responsible for torture, illegal detention, forced exile and shootings of hundreds of Ogoni protesters during the 1990s.

Shell has strongly denied the charges. In a statement to the Guardian, a Royal Dutch Shell spokesman in the Netherlands said the 1995 executions were tragic events that the company tried to prevent through appeals for clemency to the Nigerian government of the time.

“To our deep regret, that appeal went unheard, and we were shocked and saddened when we heard the news. Shell in no way encouraged or advocated any act of violence against them or their fellow Ogonis,” said the statement.

The dispute between Shell and the Ogoni protesters stems from the company’s extensive interests in the Niger delta stretching back to 1958. It now owns about 90 oil fields across the country.

From the early 1990s, non-violent protests began among Ogonis unhappy about the impact of oil exploration, which they said was destroying the environment that they depended on for fishing or farming.

Clearance work to make way for pipelines was decimating the world’s third-largest mangrove forest. Oil spills were rife, polluting the land at a rate, campaigners said, equivalent to an Exxon Valdez oil disaster every year. Oil flares only made the pollution worse.

In 1990 Saro-Wiwa, a well-known journalist and activist, helped found the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, bringing its case against Shell’s destruction of the environment to an international audience. A peaceful protest in 1993 mobilised 300,000 Ogonis.

A year later the Ogoni nine were arrested on what were widely regarded to have been trumped-up charges. The men were tortured, beaten and then put on trial in front of a tribunal without legal representation. They were sentenced to death.

The civil action is slated for a federal US court under an obscure 1789 law that initially applied to piracy. In 2004 the supreme court ruled that it could be used by foreign parties to bring cases against defendants – including multinational corporations – in specific areas, notably torture and crimes against humanity.

So far very few cases have been brought to trial under the act, and none have proved successful for plaintiffs. But ­Jennie Green of the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, which filed the case, said that human rights cases against corporations were still so new that no pattern had yet been established.

“Juries decide on the facts and we think we have a strong case that will convince them to hold Shell accountable for what they did. They were involved in human rights violations, participating, aiding and abetting,” she said.

If it does go to trial, the case is expected to last up to a month, with Shell calling 11 witnesses and the Ogoni campaigners presenting up to 20. Among the latter will be Ken Saro-Wiwa Jr, the son of the executed leader, who will be pressing for compensation for his father’s death.

For him, the case is not just an attempt to complete his father’s search for justice. “It’s the final stage for me,” Saro-Wiwa Jr said. “In a sense I’ve lost the past 12 years of my life.”

The other witnesses include the executed leader’s brother, Owens Wiwa. He will allege that Brian Anderson, the then head of Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, offered him a deal ensuring Saro-Wiwa would be released on condition that the Ogoni protests were called off.

The jury will be presented with evidence that the subsidiary told its parent company that Saro-Wiwa would be convicted and that he would never go free. They will also hear that two key witnesses at the trial that led to the hangings of the Ogoni nine later recanted, saying they had been bribed to give false testimony with offers of Shell jobs.

Karalolo Kogbara will also give evidence. She lost her crops when Shell bulldozed her village in 1993 to make way for a pipeline. When the villagers protested, Shell allegedly called for Nigerian troops, who shot her, causing her to lose an arm.

The company has yet to divulge its detailed defence, but it will be contesting every count on the grounds that the violence committed against the Ogoni was wholly caused by the Nigerian government and had nothing to do with its commercial operations.

The plaintiffs have not given any indication of the compensatory and punitive damages they are seeking, preferring to leave the matter, should they win, up to the jury. But such is the extreme nature of the charges that any award could possibly run into many millions of dollars.

Stephen Kretzmann, director of Oil Change International, who worked with Saro-Wiwa before his death, said the trial came too late for the Ogoni nine. But, whatever the outcome, he believes it will “send a message to multinationals that they have to obey local and international laws on human rights”.

Saro-Wiwa Jr said he hoped that the jury would see that the oil giant’s “fingerprints are all over this”. He added: “For a long time Shell was able to operate with impunity hiding behind a military regime. Now it’s time they were held to account.”

The Guardian, Wednesday 27 May 2009

Springsteen moment

Springsteen’s ‘Queen of the Supermarket’ song is a fun way to learn some new vocabulary. To get the most out of this learning activity be disciplined about following below sequence:

• First listen to the song without reading below song text yet. (Be good, don’t peak however tempting!)

 

• Then listen again, this time listen out for words with a similar meaning to:

- you have wished for
- passageways
- trolley
- extremely happily
- worktop
- protective clothing
- goods (shopping)
- queue where you pay the bill

 

• write down the ones you caught

Now check with the lyrics.

 

lyrics:

There’s a wonderful world where all you desire
And everything you’ve longed for is at your fingertips
Where the bittersweet taste of life is at your lips
Where aisles and aisles of dreams await you
And the cool promise of ecstasy fills the air
At the end of each working day she’s waiting there

I’m in love with the Queen of the Supermarket
As the evening sky turns blue
A dream awaits in aisle number two

With my shopping cart I move through the heart
Of a sea of fools so blissfully unaware
That they’re in the presence of something wonderful and rare
The way she moves behind the counter
Beneath her white apron her secrets remains hers
As she bags the groceries her eyes so bored
And sure she’s unobserved

I’m in love with the Queen of the Supermarket
There’s nothing I can say
Each night I take my groceries and I drift away
And I drift away

Guidance from the gods above
At night I pray for the strength to tell her
why I love I love I love I love her so
I take my place in the check-out line
For one moment her eyes meet mine
I’m lifted up, lifted up, lifted up, lifted up

I’m in love with the Queen of the Supermarket
Though a company cap covers her hair
Nothing can hide the beauty waiting there
The beauty waiting there

I’m in love with the Queen of the Supermarket
I’m in love with the Queen of the Supermarket

As I lift my groceries into my cart
I turn back for a moment and catch a smile
That blows this whole *#! place apart

I’m in love with the Queen of the Supermarket
I’m in love with the Queen of the Supermarket
I’m in love with the Queen of the Supermarket
I’m in love with the Queen of the Supermarket

 

• Did you find them?

 

They were:

- you’ve longed for
- aisles (noticed the pronunciation? not the way it is spelled…also compare aisle seat in a plane)
- shopping cart
- blissfully
- counter
- apron
- groceries
- check-out line

Hope you enjoyed it

If you’re not a Springsteen fan, you can do the same with any of your own favourite songs (as long as the lyrics aren’t limited to ‘I love you so’ repeated a hundred million times.)

‘Distributed power’ to save the Earth

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment |
Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News, Prague

Economist Jeremy Rifkin galvanised the Research Connections 2009 conference in Prague with a roadmap to simultaneously solve the economic and energy crises.

He proposed a pan-European strategy of small-scale energy generation and smart energy grids that make everyone a partner in energy.

What is more, he said, the plan would create millions of jobs and foster investment that would see the end of the current economic crisis.

Mr Rifkin leads a roundtable of 100 top CEOs and government officials who have subscribed to the plan.

The roundtable is part of the Foundation on Economic Trends, which Mr Rifkin founded.

He said old economic models will not see humanity through, and the combination of the climatic, energy and economic woes of the planet created a “perfect storm” that will see in a new era for its inhabitants.

But such a revolution is not unique to human history, he said.

“The great economic revolutions in history occur when two things happen,” he explained.

“First, we humans change the way we organise the energy of the Earth; we’ve done this frequently over the course of our history.

“Second, and equally important, we change the way we communicate to organise new energy regimes. When energy revolutions converge with communication revolutions, those are the pivotal points in human history.”

Your building becomes your power plant, just like your computer becomes your information vehicle to the world

Jeremy Rifkin
The current renewable energy push, in common with the information and communication technology revolution that characterised the 1990s, is just such a pairing of regime changes.

But in Mr Rifkin’s grand plan, every citizen of the EU would participate in order to revolutionise the way energy is generated, used, and monetised.

Four pillars

Although the sheer scope of the idea raised eyebrows throughout the room, Mr Rifkin laid out a cogent, four-part plan that he said could in one stroke dispel the perfect storm he described.

The first two pillars of the plan were a call to technological arms:
further develop renewable energy technologies’ efficiencies, amplify production to access “economies of scale”, and develop means to store the intermittent energy they harvest.

The third pillar is a common idea writ very large indeed. He called for a pan-European commitment to microgeneration – small installations of renewable energy technology work in place of, for example, vast wind farms – but on every single building already up or yet to be built.

“We cannot build enough centralised wind and solar parks to run Europe,” he said.

“If this energy is distributed over every square foot all over the world, why would we collect it only at a few points? The problem is we’re using 20th century, centralised, top-down business models.”

The large-scale, centralised nature of power generation may be changing
Instead, Mr Rifkin suggested overhauling the technology of infrastructure and architecture such that buildings have integral power generation: solar panels and small vertical wind turbines on roofs, heat pumps harvesting geothermal energy in basements.

In rural settings, agricultural waste could be used to generate methane and in coastal regions, tidal power could be harvested.

“Your building becomes your power plant, just like your computer becomes your information vehicle to the world. Every home, factory, industrial park, every building is converted,” he explained.

While existing buildings could generate a sizeable fraction of their energy demands, new buildings would be “positive power” – generating more than they need through grand changes in building materials and architecture.

Jump-start

Such an idea is not new; in fact, installations are already underway. Mr Rifkin cited car maker GM’s Opel factory in Zaragoza, Spain, which sports a $78m (£52m) solar panel array.

It produces some 10 Megawatts of power, which means the energy savings could pay for the installation in just nine years.

Elsewhere in Spain, Navarra and Aragon have, in the past 10 years, moved to generating 70% of their energy with renewables.

Using wind turbines in the Pyrenees, hydroelectric generation from snowmelt, and sun-tracking solar arrays, Aragon will be 100% self-sufficient in six months and be in energy surplus in six more.

“Everyone can do that tomorrow,” Mr Rifkin emphasised. Moreover, it is a handy way out of an economic abyss.

“If you want to jump-start an economy it’s always about construction. You jump-start not hundreds of thousands of jobs building solar collectors, but millions of jobs reconverting the entire infrastructure.”

The scale of the proposed changeover is unconvincing for Paul Ekins, professor of energy and environment policy at King’s College London.

“People tend to want power when they demand it and they tend to want it to be there all the time,” he told BBC News.

“It’s certainly possible that microgeneration has a role to play in the future energy system, but my view is that central generation is likely to be a very important part of satisfying that demand.”

‘Distributed capitalism’

Each homeowner could become a small player in the European energy market
The fourth pillar of the plan would make everyone a stakeholder in the scheme by overhauling the outdated power grid system.

“We’re going to use the same tecnology that created the internet; we take the power grid of the EU and turn it into an ‘intergrid’ that works just like the internet.

“Say you’re producing 30% of your energy need, it’s peak period in the middle of the day and you don’t need the electricity. If millions of people send just a little bit back to the grid, peer-to-peer just like we send information on the internet, that’s distributed power.”

But the distributed computing allowed by the revamped power grid could introduce a new economic paradigm – what Mr Rifkin calls “distributed capitalism”.

“The main grid [will be] completely distributed, software connected to sensors connected to every appliance in your home: thermostat, washing machine, toaster, everything.

“At any one time the system will know what every washing machine is doing in Europe. If you have peak demand, not enough supply, software can say to two million washing machines ‘forget the extra rinse’.

“If you bought the program – it’s all voluntary – you get a cheque at the end of the month or a credit from the electricity company.”

Like microgeneration, the idea of such “smart grids” has been circulating in the energy community for some time. But it is the sheer scope of all facets of Mr Rifkin’s plan that makes it unique.

He has formed the “Third Industrial Revolution Roundtable” with 100 leaders from industry – big names such as IBM and BASF are on the list – as well as governments to further promote the idea.

And he is sure that the EU will continue to lead the way, citing the “golden goose” of the union: it is the largest internal market economy in the world, making it particularly poised to undertake such an ambitious plan.

Professor Ekins wonders about the likelihood that all the facets such a long-term, high-investment initiative is what the future holds.

“The world has room for visionaries,” he said, “and one of the characteristics of visionaries is that their total vision very rarely comes true.

“Normally the future ends up having some aspect of different competing visions.”

Jason Palmer
Science and technology reporter, BBC News, Prague

Cramer vs not-Cramer

The Guardian, 13 March 2009:

How strangely unsurprising to report that when shouty CNBC Mad Money host Jim Cramer finally showed up on the Daily Show last night – after a high-profile feud that’s been running all week – it was the comedian and presenter Jon Stewart who offered the penetrating insights about the US media’s complicity in the current economic crisis, and the financial expert who was left looking hammered into the ground.

After the initial PR disaster that sparked the standoff – Rick Santelli, CNBC’s ranting demagogue, pulled out of a Daily Show interview at the last minute – someone had clearly advised Cramer to abandon his forthright TV persona and try being apologetic instead. So he barely disputed Stewart’s litany of charges that hyperventilating TV talking heads have misadvised the public for years. “If I’d only taken CNBC’s advice I’d have $1m today,” Stewart said last week, “provided I’d started with $100m.”

And he watched mutely as Stewart played clips from an interview – never intended for television – in which Cramer, a former hedge fund manager, openly discussed how he manipulated the market in his favour. “I can’t reconcile the brilliance and knowledge that you have of the intricacies of the market with the crazy bullshit I see you do every night,” Stewart observes at one point, building his thesis that there are “two economies”: the one normal people trustingly invest in, and the one where Jim Cramer’s profit-crazed friends use everyone else’s money to take disastrous risks.

Let’s give Cramer some credit for his conciliatory attitude here. But only some, because you just know he’ll be doing his Mad Money thing, exactly as before, in just a few hours’ time.”

Full Episode on The Daily Show

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Click on the CONTACT button at the top to ask about lessons

 

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The Scientist by John Cleese

Energy saving light bulbs can emit enough UV radiation to damage skin

‘Open’ bulbs can be harmful if used close to skin, but closed bulbs are safe

By: Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor, The Independent
Friday, 10 October 2008

Energy saving light bulbs can emit levels of ultraviolet radiation sufficient to damage the skin, the Government’s public health safety watchdog warned.

The agency issued what it described as “precautionary advice” yesterday after measuring levels of UV light emitted by the bulbs at the request of patient groups. They have complained that they aggravate light-sensitive conditions such as the blood disease lupus, eczema and porphyria, which together affect tens of thousands of patients across the UK.

Energy saving bulbs, also called compact fluorescent lights, have been on the market for more than 20 years and come in two types – “open” with the glass coil clearly visible, and “encapsulated” where the coil is enclosed in a second layer of glass and looks more like a conventional light bulb.

The research showed that one in five of the “open” bulbs emitted UV light equivalent to that experienced on “a sunny day in summer” when in very close proximity (less than one inch) to the skin, which warranted “some precaution”. When the light was moved further away, beyond one foot, the UV level was below the exposure on a sunny day in winter and was “not a concern”.

Open bulbs should not be used where the user is closer than one foot for more than one hour a day, the agency said. Encapsulated lights with a double glass envelope did not emit significant amounts of UV light, the research found, and could be used in place of the open kind for close work.

The problem only occurs when the lights are used for close work, such as in desk lamps or reading lights. When the light is more than one foot away there is no danger, the Health Protection Agency (HPA) said.

Justin McCracken, the chief executive of the HPA, said it was calling for product standards to be tightened under EU legislation. Measurements made when the lights first came on the market in the mid-1980s had not disclosed a problem. In the meantime it was right that the public should be warned about the existing bulbs, especially if they suffered from light-sensitive conditions.

“People should not be thinking of removing these energy saving light bulbs from their homes. If you need to use one closer than one foot away, it’s a simple adjustment – either move the light or replace it with an encapsulated bulb. I walked round my own home and found none of my energy saving bulbs were used closer than one foot. In situations where people are not likely to be very close to the bulbs for any length of time, all types of compact fluorescent light bulbs are safe to use.”

He dismissed suggestions that close exposure to the UV light emitted by the bulbs could cause cancer. “That is not what we are saying. At the exposure levels that we are talking about, the worst is that you could have short-term reddening of the skin. We do not believe these lights pose any risk in terms of skin cancer.” However, people with light-sensitive conditions “need to be careful”, he added.

Alternate energy sources …